Just Some Write-Ups

This paper was originally presented at Mopalawod, Mopalawom: The Sea and Its Transformations in Cebuano Literature, a conference held via Zoom on October 5, 2020.  * * * I. Once-Isolated Worlds   Back in 2018, in the course of doing research for a novel I had already begun writing, I interviewed a priest who told me of his idyllic childhood growing up in the fertile valleys of Tuburan, a town he frequently described as “quiet” and “sleepy,” often overshadowed by its more developed, better-known neighboring municipalities with less stony shorelines. The descriptions he provided played out like vignettes right out of a postcolonial novel: long summer treks to the beach with relatives and friends across hilly terrain, false priests roaming the countryside and performing pseudo-Catholic rituals in the presence of unsuspecting locals, clashes between communist rebels and the military, to name a few. Of particular interest—to my city-born and -bred imagination, so used to travelin...